Share this

Read more!

Protest against Bavarian PAG Police Laws turning Bavaria's police into secret police with powers not seen since the Gestapo, April, 2018.Sachelle Babbar/Press Association. All rights reserved.

Legal moves to
increase police powers in the name of fighting
terrorism are hardly new territory for Europe. The UK’s 2016 Investigatory Powers Act is
one recent example; Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 antiterrorism law, which ended
France’s state of emergency by writing many of its provisions permanently into
law, is another. But when Germany starts granting its police sweeping new
powers of surveillance, arrest and detention, the symbolic and constitutional
implications are extremely concerning.

Region by
region

That is precisely what is currently happening,
although Germany’s federal structure disguises the fact. Of the sixteen states
that make up the Federal Republic of Germany, only one (Thüringen) has not announced
any plans to tighten its police laws. In May, 30,000 people took to the streets of Munich to protest a new law
giving the Bavarian police unprecedented powers of surveillance,
undercover policing and – most eyecatchingly – the right to carry hand-grenades. To no avail: the law was passed by the CSU majority
in the Bavarian parliament: the same majority that in recent weeks threatened
to unilaterally instruct the police to defy federal government policy and turn
away refugees at the Austrian border.

The FC Köln football fans among the unions, civil liberty groups and antifascists, lawyers and environmentalists at the Düsseldorf protest, 20,000-strong. Author's photograph.

This Saturday, an estimated 20,000 demonstrators
marched in Düsseldorf to protest a similar
piece of police legislation in North Rhine-Westphalia
(NRW), Germany’s most populous federal state.

The Düsseldorf protest was notable for its diversity: unions,
civil liberty groups and antifascists marched alongside football fans, lawyers
and environmentalists. Placards from all corners of the spectrum displayed
inscriptions referring to the lessons of Germany’s past – many of them
referencing 1933, the year that the Gestapo (Secret State Police) was formed
under the Nazis.

“We in Germany know full well what happens when
a state takes complete control,” explains Nils Jansen, the mobilisation’s
youthful spokesperson: “that’s why we’re saying now that it must never happen
again.”

As in Bavaria, the crux of the new law hinges
around the term ‘impending danger’. This legalistic formulation enables the
police to act against an individual without having to produce concrete grounds
for suspicion, meaning, Jansen argues, that “everyone” could potentially be a
target: “strike organisers, demonstrators, whistleblowers, football fans,
someone who clicks on the wrong website or happens to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time – they could all end up in the police’s sights”. At the Düsseldorf demonstration it’s a message that seems to have resonated with everyone from the
digital activists wanting the police to “stay out of our smartphones” to the
football fans singing about just “wanting to get to the stadium in peace”.

Alongside the problematic concept of “impending
danger”, the NRW police law introduces a whole suite of restrictive policing
measures such as the use of tasers as service weapons, dragnet controls such as
stop and search, increased video surveillance of public spaces, telephone
hacking and digital data collection, temporary injunctions limiting a suspect’s
right to freedom of assembly and freedom of association, electronic tagging and
preventative custody of up to a month on suspicion of terrorism or seven days for
the purposes of identification.

Free
citizens

Christian Mertens is a Cologne-based lawyer
whose clients include environmental activists engaged in an ongoing struggle to
protect the Hambach Forest, an area of ancient woodland caught in the path of
energy giant RWE’s mammoth open-cast mining operation. “It is clear,” he says,
“that there has been a conscious political decision to roll out this
legislation region by region.”

Mertens sees environmental activists as being
specifically targeted by the new law, claiming that the provision for seven day
preventive custody for identification purposes is a direct response to tactics
employed during recent anti-coal actions: “it’s not about ascertaining
identity: they know who these people are! They do it as a punishment, or as a
way of educating them. It’s like a kick in the backside to show them that
they’re doing things the wrong way, and ninety nine per cent of the time it’s
directed against environmental activists.” It is, Mertens speculates, likely to
be “no accident” that the Kerpen police force, tasked with policing protest
actions in and around the Hambach Forest, will be amongst the first to
participate in a taser trial.

Mertens’ concerns are constitutional as well as
practical. The German Constitution was signed into being in 1949, a document
designed to set out the values and mechanisms of a Germany in which the horrors
of the Nazi era could never be repeated. One of the values or ‘basic rights’ is
privacy of correspondence and telecommunications: a fact which is likely to
prove key should the law be taken before the federal constitutional court.

One of the mechanisms is the so-called
“Trennungsgebot” or “separation order” which establishes a clear division
between the executive powers of the police, and the surveillance powers of the
federal intelligence agency. The hollowing out of this constitutional firewall
represents a weakening of a legal structure born directly out of the German
experience of state fascism. “The free citizen”, says Mertens, “should be
allowed to do anything, as long as it’s not explicitly forbidden. The police
should be allowed to do nothing, so long as it’s not explicitly allowed.”

Imprisoning
the innocent

NRW’s hardline Minister of the Interior, Herbert
Reul, sees things differently: “where there’s an impending danger of terrorism,
it’s constitutionally possible to give the police increased scope of action,”
he told the Rheinische Post, “now we’re saying: with other crimes too, we need
to be able to act before they can take place.” It’s a claim he has repeated on
camera, saying that it is “better to lock up one innocent person, than risk the
lives of many more.”

Lawyer Christian Mertens has a clear counter to
that argument: “in the legal profession we have the saying: ‘better to let one
hundred people go free, than imprison one single innocent’”. Verena Schäffer,
spokesperson for the regional Green Party faction, puts it even more sharply:
“Interior Minister Reul is himself a risk to freedom and to our
constitutionally chartered rights.”

NRW, however, is not Bavaria. Interior Minister
Reul does not enjoy the support of a one party majority in the regional
parliament. Instead, the CDU is part of a slim-majority coalition with the
(economically) liberal FDP, who, under the growing wave of public pressure,
have already voiced significant enough concerns to result in the CDU abandoning
its previous plans to push the law through before the summer recess.

There is, in other words, still all to play for
and the consequences of Saturday’s showdown in Düsseldorf will reach far beyond the state of NRW. “The resistance”, says Nils Jansen of the No Police Law Alliance,
“doesn’t stop here – it’s only just beginning”.

Protest against the Bavarian Polizeiaufgabengesetz (PAG) through the city of Bamberg in Northern Bavaria.NuPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.

Related

This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any
queries about republishing please
contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.